Although the likes of Crucial and Corsair seem to dominate the memory market, there are some other notable manufacturers worth paying attention to. G.Skill, of course, is among them; it does an incredible job of keeping its products in the same league as the more popular companies', but to do so it offers a little more than usual.
The G.Skill line of memory ranges from the entry-level Value brand, through the Trident, Pi, Performance, Ares, Sniper, RipJaws and finally to the model we have on test, the top-of-the range TridentX. As you can imagine, what’s on offer here is a performance lover's dream come true.
The 16GB kit consists of a pair of 8GB DDR3 PC3-19200, 2400MHz sticks, with a latency of 10-12-12-31 and running at 1.65V. The average price puts this kit at around £120, making it the most expensive one in the group test, but you can search the product number F3-2400C10D-16GTX to see if there are any deals currently on offer.
These are quite impressive looking memory sticks. The TridentX logo is printed on a red and black aluminium heatspreader, but the most startling feature is the large red heatspread fin along the top of the stick. This puts the height of the sticks at 55mm, which is pretty tall. However, G.Skill has added the ability to remove this, by unscrewing the fin and sliding it off a groove on the top of the stick, which will allow for bigger CPU coolers. Also, the removal of the fin enables you to fit an alternative cooler for the memory, whether that’s water based or some form of liquid nitrogen cooling.
The mere mention of liquid nitrogen is music to an overclocker’s ears. The TridentX has been designed to accommodate overclocking and other forms of advanced computing. However, for the reasons we mentioned previously, we couldn’t get the TridentX to go beyond 2400MHz and remain stable. Other overclockers with specialist motherboards might fare better, though.
Despite our lack of overclocking abilities, the SiSoft Sandra benchmark recorded a score of 32GB/s, just short of the HyperX Savage but beating the Corsair Vengeance. As before, then, the real-world computing and gaming tests were conducted without any bandwidth problems or anything else relating to a lack of memory speed or capacity.
The G.Skill TridentX is worthy RAM for any system, especially a gaming setup. The height may need looking into, depending on your setup, but the advantage of being able to better fit another cooling solution is certainly a bonus point. It's the most expensive kit we’ve looked at, though, so unless you have a specific need for the TridentX’s talents, you might be better off opting for either the Vengeance or the slightly better performing Savage.